Disney Renaissance

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The Disney Renaissance refers to the era beginning roughly in 1989 and ending in 1999 during which Walt Disney Animation Studios returned to making more musical animated films that were mostly based on well-known stories, and it allowed Disney's animated films to become powerhouse successes at the domestic and foreign box office; making much more profit than most of the other Disney films of the past eras.[1][2][3]

History

Background

The original Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios, which the animation department left in 1985

After the deaths of Walt and Roy O. Disney (in 1966 and 1971, respectively), The Walt Disney Studios were left in the hands of Donn Tatum, Card Walker, and Ron Miller. The films released over an eighteen-year period following this change of management did not perform as well commercially as their prior counterparts. An especially hard blow was dealt during production of The Fox and the Hound when long-time animator Don Bluth left Disney to start his own rival studio, Don Bluth Productions, taking eleven Disney animators with him.[4][5] With 17% of the animators now gone, production on The Fox and the Hound was delayed. Don Bluth Productions produced The Secret of NIMH in 1982 (whose story idea Disney had originally rejected for being too dark), and the company eventually became Disney's main competitor in the animation industry during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Disney made major organizational changes in the 1980s after narrowly escaping a hostile takeover attempt from Saul Steinberg. Michael Eisner, formerly of Paramount Pictures, became CEO in 1984, and he was joined by his Paramount associate Jeffrey Katzenberg, while Frank Wells, formerly of Warner Bros., became president. In 1985, to make more room for live-action filmmaking, the animation department was moved from the main Disney lot in Burbank to a "temporary" location in various hangars, warehouses, and trailers about two miles (3.2 km) east in nearby Glendale, where it would remain for the next ten years. Thus, most of the Disney Renaissance (in terms of where the films were actually made) actually took place in a rather ordinary industrial park in Glendale, the Grand Central Business Centre.

After the box office failure of the 1985 PG-rated feature The Black Cauldron, the future of the animation department was in jeopardy. Going against a thirty-year studio policy, the company founded a television animation division (now Disney Television Animation) which was much cheaper than theatrical animation. In the interest of saving what he believed to be the studio's core business, Roy E. Disney persuaded Eisner to let him supervise the animation department in the hopes of improving its fortunes.

In 1986, Disney released The Great Mouse Detective, while Don Bluth released An American Tail. An American Tail outperformed Mouse Detective, and became the higher-grossing film on its first release.[6] Despite An American Tail's greater level of success, The Great Mouse Detective was still successful enough (both critically and commercially) to instill executive confidence in Disney's animation department. Two years later, Oliver and Company successfully outgrossed The Land Before Time, launching an era of increased theatrical turnout for the studio.

622/610 Circle 7 Drive (the Hart-Dannon Building), where several films of the Disney Renaissance were partially produced.

Thanks to the success of the early films of the Renaissance era, Disney management was able to allocate sufficient money to bring Feature Animation back from its ten-year exile to Glendale. A 240,000-square-foot building designed by Robert A. M. Stern opened across the street from the main Disney lot in Burbank on December 16, 1994.

Disney's next film, Mulan, with a score by Jerry Goldsmith and songs by Matthew Wilder and David Zippel, came out in 1998 and earned $304 million at the worldwide box office, restoring the commercial and critical standing of Disney's output.

The release of Tarzan is retrospectively seen as the end of the Renaissance era.[23][24] With songs by Phil Collins, Tarzan won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "You'll Be in My Heart,"[25] and became Disney's most commercially successful film since The Lion King, earning $448 million at the box office and widespread positive reviews. Tarzan was also Disney's most expensive animated feature to that date at $130 million, much of which went to developing new processes such as the computer-assisted background painting technique known as "Deep Canvas". It was also the first film since the start of the Renaissance era that was written, developed and produced at the studio's new home in Burbank; all the other films had either been made entirely in Glendale or had started development in Glendale and moved with the studio to Burbank.

1985–1997: Success in television animation

While achieving success in animation motion pictures, Disney created huge strides in television as well during this time period. After 30 years of resisting offers to produce television animation, Disney finally relented once Michael Eisner, who had a background in TV, took over. The first TV cartoons to carry the Disney name, CBS' The Wuzzles and NBC's Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, both premiered in the fall of 1985. Breaking from standard practice in the medium, the productions enjoyed substantially larger production budgets than average, allowing for higher-quality writing and animation, in anticipation of recouping profitably in rerun syndication. While The Wuzzles only lasted a season, The Gummi Bears was a sustained success with a six-season run.

Reception

Critical and public reaction

Most of the films Disney released in the Renaissance era were well-received, as in the film critic site Rotten Tomatoes, four out of the first five—The Little Mermaid,Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King—have the best critical reception (with over 90% positive reviews) and are referred to among critics as the "big four",[26] while Pocahontas has the lowest reception of Disney's "renaissance" films (with 57% of positive reviews).

Awards

Nine of the ten films in the Disney Renaissance were nominated for Academy Awards, most notably Beauty and the Beast which became the first animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, six of which won at least one Academy Award; and eight of the films were nominated for Annie Awards, with seven of them winning at least one: